Notices by a kilo of saucepans (rakslice) (rakslice@mastodon.social)

@whitequark @alice @recursive the thing that gets me about it is: does the person who writes that just never spend like 30 seconds thinking about what might be of literally any relevance whatsoever to who they're writing to, or do they have just some truly totally bonkers ideas about that?

@whitequark I honestly can't parse why he brings that up, like what point there is it supposed to bolster? It reminds me most of somebody with a learned maladaptive response of saying something shocking to derail a discussion that is going in a way they don't like (but why do that in what amounts to an open letter?)

@whitequark I assume something must be broken in thunderbird imap; my world's most boring bone stock ISP e-mail setup with it also stopped working recently and I haven't bothered to figure out why

Like I have to wonder if there's a vector here for con artists to exploit people with psychiatric and personality disorders by _pretending_ to be chatbots of this nature

This is a little bit beyond what I was expecting, even in terms of the idea of selecting a specific kind of rube:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

@whitequark am I not understanding what LDR R0, [R0] means properly or is that last one just the usual rotation of data from unaligned reads on ARM7

LB x3: The dystopian future we live in where it's impossible to tell where the bit ends and the software hallucination begins

I was about to mention cyberpunk but I accidentally typed "cyberbunk" which is maybe more the right speed actually

Lots of recaps of commercial unixes say stuff like "IBM AIX is nearly as old [...] originating for the IBM RT PC in 1986, though early versions also ran on PS/2 systems and System/370 and /390 mainframes. AIX started as an early port of UNIX System V [...]" (oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-apple-network-servers-all-too.html) giving the impression that there is a piece of software with a coherent lineage there

here i go, i'm about to try switching to wayland from nvidia X11 to try to make an accessibility feature work properly and stop breaking other things on the system. let me place my bets:
- it's not going to fix it, it is just another excuse in the pantheon of capricious desktop environment dev excuses (you can't report a bug on an old version not that we're saying it's fixed, we won't accept a bug report without you doing a bunch of clerical work for us you aren't equipped to do, etc) and

on the dial between "there's a useful thing in there maybe someday" and "it's wasting more time that it's ever gonna be worth, shoot it in the head twice to make sure it dies" the needle is still firmly over toward that second one imo

It's like, I'm not some kind of "it should just work" absolutist, but I think it must be tractable to users such that you can get the explanation of the relevant moving parts in the faq or whatever; and like I'm a dev with lots of track record in faffing around with things to get them to work, I feel like it's fair to say I represent the high end of the spectrum on that

I didn't even get as far as trying the feature, I incidentally tried to open mpv and with the default settings it just segfaults, like you could not make this stuff up

- the big nest of Popsicle sticks everything is made of to get basic functionality (e.g. video decode acceleration in a browser, etc.) is going to totally fall over

@cstross @KevinMarks Like that's basically saying the LLM bubble is an opportunity to do research in the actually useful parts of AI. Sure, but like you say, these companies waste billions on long shots all the time; they could do that any time they want

@cstross "Whether or not these investments end up being profitable before they depreciate, they are on the critical path to AI’s long-term impact." well, if it turns out it has no long-term impact, then nothing was on the critical path to its long term impact

@cstross but in any case, this is just "betting the farm on something stupid has no downside on the decision maker because of how bankruptcies work, the startups story"

like if anyone can say there is a risk of overinvesting in some new unproven experimental direction compared to existing stuff _they_ know works, it should be those guys

LB: it's funny to me that in the context of that AI bubble story is the Google CEO out there saying "The risk of underinvesting is dramatically greater than the risk of overinvesting for us here" -- like looking at the Google of 10 years ago, they were the company to beat in conventional AI natural language processing and pre-LLM machine learning as part of an actual product or service millions of people use every day,

it's like all of a sudden they decided their remaining existing products and services were worth zero and they urgently have to invest whatever they can in LLM like just another monster-of-the-week venture effort